Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to hand-held phone display management and more particularly to the arrangement of icons in a display of a hand-held device.
Description of the Related Art
The conventional graphical user interface (GUI) has been widely used for many years. The primary function of the GUI includes providing user interface controls with which the end user can interact with an underlying application. The common GUI includes many stock user interface controls, most of which, when combined, can accommodate most computer human interactions required by an application. For example, the static text box control can be used to present text to the end user while an edit box can permit the user to provide textual input to the application. A radio button control can provide for the exclusive selection of an element from among a field of elements, and, of course, a menu bar can provide a selection of drop down menus with menu entries logically linked to programmatic functions of an underlying application.
When user interface controls are displayed in a GUI, often one must compromise between the amount of information that can be displayed within the GUI display, and the amount of displayable space within the GUI display in which a preferred amount of information can be presented. Where the display area must be reduced due to height and width constraints, information that otherwise might be easily grouped and viewed in within a larger display space often cannot be presented as a single, cohesive set of interrelated interface controls. This circumstance has been known to arise in the use of pervasive devices, including handheld computers and portable cellular telephones. In the case of pervasive devices, the display area sometimes can be limited to as little as a one-hundred sixty (160) pixel by 160 pixel region or less.
The handheld computing device, as a pervasive device, suffers the same display constraints. To address the constraints of a limited display, several conventional handheld computing devices employ a grid type display of application icons as the primary user interface control for the handheld device. The grid type display includes a fixed grid into which application icons are placed. Applications are accessed through a keypad or touch screen selection of the icon. Though the applications can be sorted in the grid in a number of ways, the cells of the grid are always populated in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom fashion leaving no cells unfilled in the process. The number of cells viewable at any given time cannot change, however, multiple different viewable frames of the same number of cells in the grid can be provided as pages in the handheld computing device.
Thus, it is to be recognized that the user interface paradigm of the grid, while efficient, also is limited. As a number of applications accessible through the handheld computing device increases, organizing the applications into different pages each of a fixed grid can become increasingly more difficult. In particular, locating an application of choice by the end user then involves tedious page turning of grid views seeking out the application of choice.